Chocolate with salt

Lately I struggle to find the time and leisure to write. I don't know if I should blame it on the sleepless nights due to my baby boy or the famous springtime lethargy.
Yes, it's springtime in Windhoek and it's nice and warm and just beautiful. It's my favourite time of the year, with very nice temperatures, it's already hot, but not too hot and there are no mosquitoes, bees, moths, cockroaches and any other crawling stuff yet.
We are also busy preparing our veggie garden. This winter we decided on throwing everything out, feeding the soil and starting from the beginning and I promised myself to learn from my mistakes made the last years and hope we will have a bigger yield this year. I would also like to invest more time in my garden and I'm really looking forward to it.
With the beginning of the spring and the temperatures rising, our appetite for salads is back. What a better way of saying goodbye to the winter than with a combination of winter salad with fresh and young beetroot.
I must honestly admit, that I wasn't sure, if beetroot is edible raw. Only when I started researching for that matter I realised, that I was drinking beetroot juice for ages without giving it a thought for once. So the obvious answer is, yes, beetroot is edible raw and very healthy.
To make the salad substantial, I added my gratinated goats cheese croutons was a match made in heaven  with the sweetness of the beetroot and the fruitiness of the pear.

The first time I've made that dish, we were growing beetroot in our garden and all the beetroot was ready at the same time, so I was looking for different dishes I could work with. I love beetroot, but the only dishes I could come up with, were salad or soup. I wasn't in the mood for either of those. I knew, I will cook some beetroot and preserve for later, but there was still plenty left. So I stumbled upon that recipe, but decided to use a tart I knew from another recipe I've made several times already. I love that dough recipe, as it's really quickly done and doesn't contain half a cube of butter (as you maybe remember, I'm trying to lose some weight). Also I'm not a fan of puff pastry tarts - I guess it's also the butter content. Don't get me wrong, I love puff pastry, but not in that kind of dishes. Beside, there are so many fantastic tart doughs and using puff pastry is kind of boring, to me at least.
Why am I telling all this, because every time I've made that tart, I thought, it must taste great with goats cheese. So that time my inspiration came from the goats cheese lying in my fridge and of course the glass of ready-to-eat beetroot in my pantry. As I said, the very first time, I've made the tart with fresh beetroot and wasn't that stoked about the outcome. Since I'm using jarred beetroot, I like the taste much more. And that's really rare, as I normally prefer fresh products.
By the way, we don't grow beetroot in our garden anymore, because we are way too impatient and somehow the bugs in our garden seemed to love the beetroot at least as much as we do. So no beetroot anymore, we tried carrots instead. But that's another story.

Let's start with my Beetroot tart with red onion confit, goats cheese and walnuts

It's summer in Namibia and extremely hot this year. The rain just doesn't want to come and everybody is eagerly awaiting the weather to change. Nobody feels like eating this days, including me and I find it extremely difficult to come up with any recipe what so ever. However, we must eat something. The challenge nowadays is to find something light but substantial, preferable salads.
In December my husband and I watched a cooking show on television, I think it was Christmas with Jamie or something similar, I can't really recall. They served goats cheese with fresh figs and walnuts. Straightaway I was back with my thoughts in my little French restaurant I was managing for a while back in Berlin and remembered the amazing salad served with gratinated goats cheese.

So, a few days ago we had our

Gratinated goats cheese croutons on a bed of baby leaf salad with caramelised figs and roasted walnuts